Is there a point in helping people find jobs?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Especially when jobs are scarce, there are always a lot of resources available to help people find jobs, such as job fairs, help writing resumes, classes about how to search for jobs, and of course the government requires many people on public assistance or unemployment to participate in an array of job-seeking activities.

In times of high unemployment, I’m wondering if there’s really any point in all that. Sure, those resources could help one particular person find a job, but it will just be that person getting the job instead of someone else who is just as likely to need it. Even when it comes to people receiving benefits from the government, getting one person set up in a low-paying job just leaves one less slot for another person who likely will need public assistance if they can’t find a job, too.

What difference does it really make overall which 10% (or whatever) of people are unemployed? Sure, some people need jobs more than others, but that’s true of those who use job search resources and those who don’t. I know to some extent there are things like tax breaks for businesses who hire welfare recipients and that could create a few more jobs, but it also lowers tax revenue so it might be a wash.

So…is there some point I’m not getting, or is all this effort just to make people feel like something is being done to help the unemployed?

2

Some of the help is zero-sum (like resume writing), where you criticism is justified. Others, though, don’t only have zero-sum benefits, they lower transaction costs for all participants. Lowering transaction costs tend to increase the number of transactions made, not just shift them around.

Think of Ebay, some of its sales are from people who buy from Ebay instead of a brick & mortar store but other sales wouldn’t have happened at all if transaction costs hadn’t been lowered by Ebay (or something like Ebay).

3

I think you have a good point, but even during the worst unemployment levels there are always some jobs available, even if not enough to go around, and it improves the situation (for both employers and would-be workers) if that slack in the job market can be reduced to a minimum, which these sorts of efforts may help to do, a little bit.

Whether the efforts are worth the resources put into them, though, is questionable. Mostly, I think, they are done for broadly political reasons, to make people think the government is trying to help (without actually doing anything expensive, that might really get the economy going again), and to keep the unemployed feeling guilty rather than angry.

4

About 2 years ago, when my unemployment ran out, and I was really struggling emotionally, my therapist/pdoc finally verbally slapped me upside the head and said, “you’re sick, stupid.” (paraphrased of course ;)) My friends and family agreed.

I’d been wanting to avoid this. I applied for disability, but refused to give up, in the meantime. I ended up applying for public assistance, a condition of which required me to attend a job training/job search program. Due to some problems with my application (they were convinced I was hiding money somewhere, despite me giving them all the records I had) the most assistance I got was less than $50 a month in food stamps. But that’s neither here nor there.

I worked with the local Goodwill, which had a Job Seekers program that met every week. We would get together and discuss current postings on the web, as well as meet with individual counselors. I applied for jobs every week (at the time, I did not have internet at home and had to use the computers at the library or at Goodwill). Nothing.

I have to say here: I am a college graduate (though of an age where they told me to take the date of the diploma off my resume). I had 13 years of office experience. I generally got along well with my co-workers. I have excellent written communication skills. To my detriment, I am rather shy with people I don’t know; however, in small groups I get comfortable pretty quickly. And, unlike a lot of people, I don’t get bored doing the same things over and over.

Not getting call-backs on my applications was so disheartening. You just want to give up, you know? But at the time, my mother (who’d moved in after she’d had a stroke and was unable to live by herself) was basically supporting me, and things were WAY too tight. Having the Goodwill program, and my Goodwill counselor, helped me keep going. (I told him once that sometimes the only way I could get my act together was because I knew I had an appointment with him, and didn’t want to have to tell him I’d gotten nothing done in the last week or two. ;))

So I think for some people, these programs can do a lot of good. But they won’t help you if you really just don’t want to work.

I was in the program until May 2011, when I (finally!) managed to get a temp job with a great company. It was only 20 hours a week, and they couldn’t guarantee how long it would last. I didn’t care; I was thrilled. It wasn’t even far from home!

Then, 2 1/2 weeks in, my disability lawyer calls and says I got approved for disability. :smack:

Much as I hated to, I had to give up the job. The 10-hour days were killing me (6 am-4:30 pm, a few times even later). I have a bad back, and even sitting all day scanning documents tired me out to the point where I was exhausted when I got home. In addition, disability would pay me $400 a month more than the job I was at, and would include benefits, which I would need to get better.

The current plan is to follow up on anything that can potentially help me get better (art therapy, CPAP, whatever) in addition to therapist/doctor visits. I’d like to get back to work (or grad school) before I turn 45.

The bummer is going to be that the Goodwill program that helped me a couple years ago doesn’t exist in my area anymore. :frowning:

5

Okay, that makes sense. Which programs decrease transaction costs? Tax credits might, if employers use them to hire more people instead of just saving money for themselves on positions they were going to fill anyway. Job fairs might under some circumstances, but right now when a simple free ad on Craigslist all but guarantees you more applicants than you could ever need, I don’t think they would.

That’s pretty much what I was thinking. When there are supposedly all these helpful resources out there, if you don’t have a job you must not be trying hard enough, and why do you hate America?

Sure they can help some individuals. But let’s pretend every single unemployed person really wants to work and participates in a program like that…how many fewer unemployed people do we have? (Okay, a few less, because we’d need people to staff all those programs, but the same thing could be accomplished by hiring people to dig holes and then fill them back in.)

6

Those programs may not help everybody, but they’ll help some people. They certainly helped me. When I was unemployed earlier this year I used the help offered by one of those programs to fine tune my resume, and to practice my interviewing skills. I got a great job as a result.

7

My question is if the programs help the overall situation. Or is it just helping some individuals at the expense of other, similarly-situated (so no one try to make this about wealth redistribution or something) individuals?

As far as I can tell, it seems kind of like if you have a parking lot without enough spaces for all the cars, and a bunch of people are just circling around, wasting gas and being berated for causing global warming. So to fix that problem, you offer or force assistance to find a spot on some of the drivers. Of course it can help those people, but it puts the other people at somewhat of a disadvantage and does nothing to solve the problem.

Now if you had a parking lot that did have enough spaces but it was a big, confusing lot where it could be hard to find the open spots, then sure that would help the situation overall.

8

I’m not really sure I understand you. Let’s say there’s only one job out there, and two people unemployed: me, and some other guy. Without the service provided, it’s possible that neither of us would get the job, because our resume or interviewing skills was not good enough. With the service, at least one of us has a chance to get it.

I mean, in the case of the particular job I did get, I know the company was perfectly willing to wait as long as it took – for months, if necessary – to find someone who had exactly the skills and experience they were looking for. Essentially, the service opened up this job which would still be unfilled if my resume hadn’t been fixed up.

9

Okay, so that particular job didn’t have more qualified applicants than positions available, so that’s more like the parking lot that has enough spaces but you have to know how to find them. I don’t think most positions, particularly positions available to participants in employment programs run by government or nonprofit organizations, are like that.

10

Unemployment benefits and social welfare programs are not available to any one individual on an indefinite basis. Finding someone a job may save them from falling into homelessness, or keep their family together, or enable someone to have health insurance. All of these things are good for both an individual and society.

Also, the longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is for them to ever find a job.

The mistake you’re making is assuming that all individuals are exchangeable, so it doesn’t matter who gets a job. But in terms of their costs on society, some individuals need a job more than others. For instance, I would be doing a better service for society by hiring a single mother who would otherwise be on welfare than I would be by hiring a tenth-grader looking for extra spending money. But without a job assistance program, the single mother may not know about the job position. Or she may not have the kind of interview skills that would make her appealing, and I may go with the teenager instead.

11

Except that this is a special, magic parking lot. The more people find a spot, the more the parking lot expands.

Skipping out of metaphor, the more people are employed, the healthier the economy, the more employment spots there are. That’s the theory, anyway.

I’m qualified as a systems designer and as a help-desk staffer. Suppose both positions are advertised in the Help Wanted ads. If I’m looking for a job, I’ll apply on both and easily get the help-desk job. Person X, with barely enough credentials for the help-desk job, will be out of luck. Now suppose Person X gets job-hunting training that helps him/her land the help-desk job. I’ll work a little harder and get the systems designer job. Now both of us will pay taxes and buy new toasters. Which might create a job in the domestic toaster industry. Everybody wins.

(I’m not entirely buying/advocating this, I’m just trying to find a justification for the job-hunting training.)

12

When I was layed off a few years back from the giant insurance company I was working for, part of my severance package included 3 months free services from this company that helps people find jobs. They do all kinds of training workshops, host networking activities, resume writing assistance, even videotaped practice interviews.

I didn’t find it particularly useful. I can already write an awesome resume. I found the “counselors”, mostly middle-aged women with HR backgrounds, stupid and condescending (much like all HR people). And it does no good to network with other unemployed people because it’s like a bunch of drunks trying to stumble home together.
The “point” of these services, however, is that many if not most people don’t know how to find a job. Mostly because they don’t know how the corporate hiring process really works.

13

Hm, true, but in that case it could equally well be fixed by giving the company training to understand that if you have too many applicants, you should pick the ones with good resumes AND good skills, but if you DON’T HAVE ENOUGH APPLICANTS, you’ve lost your leverage, and you need to actually READ the resumes and interview the applicants and find out who has the skills, whether or not their resumes have been polished to be easy to slot into key boxes… :slight_smile:

14

But they’re not good for the person who would have otherwise gotten the job, and needs it for similar reasons.

I know there are time limits on some programs, but when there aren’t enough jobs to go around, I wonder if that should be the case.

15

Well, the people providing those resources now have jobs.